My congressman's fixation with high school girls
Representative Josh Gottheimer is trying to crush pro-Palestine protests at a local high school.
It’s not every day that a sitting member of the United States Congress makes a pair of high schoolers his nemesis. And yet here we are.
A couple months ago, New Lines published my article about Long Island charities fundraising for Israeli settlements. (I also published an audiovisual supplement here.) That was only part of the reporting I did on the New York suburbs’ reaction to the war in Gaza.
Today, The Intercept published my dispatch from Teaneck, New Jersey, where Democratic congressman Josh Gottheimer has gone to war with a local high school for allowing a pro-Palestine rally led by students Maryam Marey and Amar Halak. He’s even gotten the U.S. Department of Education involved.
The timing of the article worked out really interestingly, because Teaneck is about to be in the news again next week. In a now-viral video, Jewish anti-Zionist resident Rich Siegel complained about a planned March 10 real estate fair that will include West Bank settlement property.
“What this real estate event is going to do is it’s going to fan the flames,” Siegel said. “If it goes forward, there will be a demonstration. I know there’s going to be a demonstration because I’m going to organize it. It will be very well-attended.”
The story of Teaneck is at once familiar and bizarre. All the usual lines about Israel, Palestine, Jewish-Americans, Muslim-Americans, and student protests are there. But zoom in a little closer, and you see a very peculiar set of local politics with a very strange cast of characters.
Gottheimer himself is one such character. Although there’s nothing unusual about a centrist Democrat trying to burnish his pro-Israel credentials, or punching left by going after students, Gottheimer’s decision to get involved in a dispute with minors rather than young adults is unusual. It fits a pattern of socially awkward behavior by the congressman.
Finally, the article is an example of how FOIA requests pair well with old-fashioned in-person reporting. Although congressional offices are exempt from freedom-of-information laws, Gottheimer’s staff were in contact with local officials whose emails I could request, which allowed me to figure out many behind-the-scenes details about what I was seeing.
You should absolutely read the whole report at The Intercept. Here, I wanted to explain some of the backstory.
The story really begins in 2020, with the Black Lives Matter movement, a moment I didn’t have space to delve into for The Intercept. After considerable local controversy, Teaneck put up a mural for a Black resident killed by police in 1990.
A few months later, the Teaneck town council announced a flag-raising ceremony to celebrate Israeli independence day and show solidarity with Jews who “have been targeted merely for support of the State of Israel.”
Keith Kaplan, the town councilman who pushed for the Israeli ceremony, was a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter, at least in the beginning. Some of his constituents, however, saw the Israeli flag raising as their answer to the Black Lives Matter mural.
Other Jewish and even Israeli-American residents were uncomfortable with the idea of having an Israeli flag represent them. At the same time, the May 2021 uprising in Jerusalem and Gaza was heating up. The Israeli flag raising, which was not a politically neutral act before, became much more provocative.
The town cancelled the ceremony, but the local chapter of American Muslims for Palestine decided to go ahead with a counterprotest. Israeli and diaspora media spread panic about hordes of outside agitators descending on a Jewish town. The Jerusalem Post described “militia-like pro-Palestinian gangs” targeting a town “where many Jews live.”
The protest itself was a low-key, family-oriented affair. It was met by a tiny counterprotest. It also foreshadowed the intense weirdness behind local Israeli-Palestinian politics.
The protesters included Rick Whilby, a tow truck driver from Englewood whose side hobby seems to be making antisemitic and other provocative comments at municipal meetings. He tried to convince me that Moses was a Black man, a belief held by Black Hebrew Israelites, who believe that modern Jews are imposters.
The counterprotesters included a Christian Zionist, a Turning Point USA staffer who drove all the way from Connecticut, and an apparently Orthodox Jewish man who ranted about the New World Order. He blamed Zionism for the Holocaust but stood on the pro-Israel side because he believed that Islam was seeking world domination.
A few weeks later, Gottheimer spoke at a massive pro-Israel rally in Teaneck. The organizers explicitly modeled it after the annual Israeli nationalist flag march in Jerusalem.
The ongoing controversy around Teaneck High School is Round Two for a lot of these same characters. And the drama seems to be, just like in 2020 and 2021, an expression of anxieties about different ethnic groups’ place in a changing New Jersey as much as anything to do with the Middle East.
Again, you really should read the full report at The Intercept. If this all has not been intriguing enough, here is my eyewitness account of the strangest thirty minutes I have ever witnessed.
Whilby insisted to The Intercept that he “absolutely” makes a distinction between Jews and Zionists. While mingling with protesters during the February protest, Whilby approached Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesman
for Neturei Karta, a fundamentalist Jewish group that opposes Zionism
on religious grounds. Whilby praised Neturei Karta for doing the “right thing” in the face of opposition, then proceeded to claim that he was being harassed by “sodomites” because his enemies had added him to the gay dating app Grindr. He had to explain to a nonplussed Weiss what Grindr was.
Kaplan, meanwhile, broke off from the group of councilpeople and continued filming the marching high schoolers from an alley. A few weeks earlier, during a town council meeting, Kaplan had made a racist comment about Palestine solidarity protesters. “These days, we’ve got jihadi janes walking around town as if intifada is a cool thing to do. No! It’s about murdering people, you sick bastards,” he said during a virtual January town council meeting, to gasps from the crowd. Pagan, the mayor, shut off Kaplan’s video link, citing advice from the municipal attorney.
Standing in the alley, Kaplan did not exercise such bravado. He stood silently after an Intercept reporter approached him and requested an interview. A nearby man with a camera began to berate Kaplan for “filming high schoolers.” Kaplan silently retreated further into the alley, poking his phone out.
I am…excited (?) that I got to record these moments for posterity. Now go read the article!